The old Latin legal phrase, res judicata, means a thing already decided and settled. Res judicata is a legal principle quite consistently followed by almost all courts. It is the rule that a final judgment or decree on the merits of a matter by a court of competent jurisdiction will be final and conclusive as to any later lawsuit on all points or matters determined in the former suit. This means that between the parties themselves the dispute is closed at the conclusion of trial. However, this does not prevent a lower court decision from being appealed to a higher court.

This principle of res judicata prevents an unsuccessful litigant from taking an unfavorable decision to another trial court for a second lawsuit on the same complaint or same set of facts. Res judicata applies between the parties in a civil lawsuit, affecting those parties and no others.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Throughout history people who have achieved the greatest success in life have been those who were not afraid to fail. In fact, most of them failed time and again and often in a very big way.

Thomas Edison tried 2,500 times to invent the light bulb before he finally succeeded. Abraham Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for public office 6 times before he was elected president. History is replete with stories of famous people who were well acquainted with failure; people who set goals higher than what they at first could achieve and who then preserved until they became conquerors.

If a certain amount of failure is intrinsic to great success, why is it such an evil word? Why do most of us place severe limitations on ourselves in order to avoid failure, even to the point of sacrificing our dreams?

A person trained in the behavioral sciences could have a field day with this question. For our purposes here, in very simple terms, we can say that people are afraid of failure because they never learned to see it as friend. Instead of seeing it as a stepping-stone to success, they view it as a blockade.

In order for people to realize their full potentials they must be given permission to fail. When this permission is granted the element of fear is removed. Fear is the great enemy of power. As long as people are consumed by the fear of being rejected, the fear of losing face with their peers, or the fear of losing their job, they can never reach their full potentials.

When people are denied permission to fail, they play it safe. Their reach never exceeds their grasp. They set goals lower than what they are capable of achieving. The result is that the company loses valuable productivity. Mediocrity instead of excellence is the norm. business opportunities are missed. And the people are deprived of the exhilarating experience that comes from taking risks, beating the odds, and accomplishing the near impossible.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The poor performance of star companies in the 1980s and 90s, both MNCs and domestic, has amply demonstrated their susceptibility to under-perform in the face of rapid and marked changes in technology, competition and customer expectations. It is not that all these companies lacked resources, capabilities or competent managers to anticipate and assess the impending changes and initiate proactive action; what they lacked was concern on the part of their managers to enhance the shareholder value of their respective firms on a sustained basis. As a result, this value got diverted to the customers, employees, competitors and suppliers of the company. While it is well known that a firm needs to develop distinctive capabilities and also build a strong network with its key stakeholders to enhance its value creating potential and appropriation of value this created, what really happened in case of most of these unsuccessful firms was that one or more of the stakeholders gained at the expense of the shareholders. The proponsity of managers to take operating, investment and financial decisions without any concern as to how such decisions can affect their shareholders led them to pursue strategies and investments that were ill-conceived and poorly executed, thereby systematically destroying the capabilities and equity developed over the years.

We should argue how the outcome of such a tendency can be detrimental to not only the firms but also to the job and career of the managers, particularly in the light of the various new developments—such as economic liberalization and opening up of most economies to domestic and global competition, greater freedom to access and move capital, emergence of the market for corporate control, and rising shareholder, activism—which have brought the issue of enhancing shareholders’ wealth to the forefront.

It is clear that managers will need to take a fresh guard and revisit their strategies, business processes and organization in order to face this complex set of challenges and retain their firm’s ability to enhance wealth of their shareholders. Thanks to the contribution made by the academia and practising executives, managers now have access to various concepts based on experiences when it comes to facing such challenges. However, it must be stressed that the need of the hour is not another set of concepts and framework; rather what is required is a new “philosophy of business” that draws the attention of every employee of an organization, starting with the CEO, to the importance of creating, enhancing and sustaining shareholder value in everything that the company does—be it strategic, tactical or even routine matters. Needless to say, the employees will also need guidelines on how to operationalize this new philosophy and what actions are needed to sustain the same.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight